Although he gained a small following, Watkins' ideas were never accepted by the British archaeological establishment, a fact that frustrated him. He viewed archaeologists as antagonists, seeing them as the personification of the modern materialism he was railing against. However, belief in ley lines persists among various esoteric groups, having become an "enduring feature of some brands of esotericism". The bubble was burst, a little, in the late 1980s when scholars Tom Williamson and Liz Bellamy worked out that the density of archaeological sites in the British landscape is so great that a line drawn through virtually anywhere would "clip" any number of significant places.

The paper by statistician Simon Broadbent [53] is one such example and the discussion after the article involving a large number of other statisticians demonstrates the high level of agreement that alignments have no significance compared to the null hypothesis of random locations. But at heart, this practical man of means insisted that ley lines were a crucial element of pre-Roman British trade, tentative first steps on the journey to the mercantile empire in which Watkins grew up. Wedd suggested that either spacecraft were following the prehistoric landmarks for guidance or that both the leys and the spacecraft were following a "magnetic current" flowing across the Earth. I had only had the pleasure of reading about them in para/supernatural books and I believe in an episode of Midsomer Murders, so this book was a bit of an eye opener for me. Danny Sullivan's Ley Lines does this with reference to all the theories that have ever been put forward to explain the archaic landscape line.Ley lines have been the subject of heated debate between ley hunters and archaeologists ever since their discovery by Alfred Watkins in the 1920s. As David Newnham wrote in 2000: "Throughout the 60s and 70s, ley-line theory was to mutate and bifurcate, to bend with every passing fad, so that it frequently seemed as though its only purpose was to highlight the failings of our own times. The author of these pages walked well over 3,000 miles across the hills of Scotland over a ten year period to understand the concept of ley lines, after watching a progamme on “Tomorrow’s World” on how to use a simple divining rod to pick up energies which are probably unknown to science.

The problem is, many books on this subject are overwhelmed with new age gibberish, UFOs and other similar topics. And Mitchell’s decision to place the tor at Glastonbury at the centre of his network, the capital of his sacred landscape, is still played out most summers on the Eavis family farm. Alfred Watkins was born in Hereford in 1855 and was an enthusiastic early photographer, the inventor of much apparatus, including the pinhole camera and the Watkins exposure meter. It was later edited by Paul Screeton, who also wrote the book Quicksilver Heritage, in which he argued that the Neolithic period had seen an idyllic society devoted to spirituality but that this was brought to an end through the introduction of metal technologies in the Bronze Age.Iain Sinclair’s early poetry, especially the 1975 book Lud Heat, explicitly centres on the notion of ley lines under the urban landscape of London, complete with maps.

Although often hostile to archaeologists, some ley hunters attempted to ascertain scientific evidence for their belief in earth energies at prehistoric sites, evidence they could not obtain. The local Episcopal church (ringed, bottom) has its main roof ridge aligned to the corner stones of its burial ground and Mausoleum 2. His critics noted that the straight lines he proposed would have been highly impractical means of crossing hilly or mountainous terrain, and that many of the sites he selected as evidence for the leys were of disparate historical origins. Many of Richard Long’s landscape works are clearly influenced by the ley line idea, as are the works of fellow landscape artist Hamish Fulton. Hutton noted that this pulled along "a potential fissure between rationalism and mysticism which had always been inherent in the movement".Watkins believed that the Long Man of Wilmington in Sussex depicted a prehistoric " dodman" with his equipment for determining a ley line.

For six days, tan jones moved through urban and rural landscapes, on the way encountering several holloways – roads or tracks that are significantly lower than the land on either side, and not formed by recent engineering – and The Harrow Way, said to be the oldest road in Britain. It gives a detailed history of the subject from its Edwardian roots, through the hippy revival of the 1960s and 70s, to the rational and multidisciplinary approach of the late 1990s. Since the 1960s, members of the Earth Mysteries movement and other esoteric traditions have commonly believed that such ley lines demarcate " earth energies" and serve as guides for alien spacecraft.His ideas were rejected by most experts on British prehistory at the time, including both the small number of recognised archaeological scholars and local enthusiasts. Parish churches were particularly favoured by the ley hunters, who often worked on the assumption that such churches had almost always been built atop pre-Christian sacred sites. Born in 1855 into a well-to-do farming family, Watkins was also an amateur archaeologist; it was while out riding in 1921 that he looked out over the landscape and noticed what he later described as a grid of straight lines that stood out like "glowing wires all over the surface of the county", in which churches and standing stones, crossroads and burial mounds, moats and beacon hills, holy wells and old stone crosses, appeared to fall into perfect alignment. Continuing belief [ edit ] Modern Pagans in Britain often believe in ley lines running through ancient sites, such as the Coldrum Long Barrow in Kent.